Umberto Eco Quotes on Love

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.

He who falls in love in bars doesn’t need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.

The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.

Umberto Eco Quotes About Writing

I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don’t tell anybody what I’m doing. I’m living in my private world. And it’s a great sensation.

An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.

When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.

Umberto Eco Quotes Internet

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything – reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?

A great problem of the internet is how to filter information, how to discard what is not relevant or what is silly and to keep only the important information.

The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopaedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.

Given that there are seven billion people living on this earth, there is a consistent quantity of imbecile or idiot, okay. Previously, these people could express themselves only with their friends or at the bar after two or three glasses of something, and they said every silliness, and people laughed. Now they have the possibility to show up on the internet. And so, on the internet, along with the messages of a lot of interesting and important people – even the Pope is writing on Twitter – we have a great quantity of idiots.

Umberto Eco Quotes Books

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

To escape the power of the unknown, to prove to yourself that you don’t believe in it, you accept its spells. Like an avowed atheist who sees the Devil at night, you reason: He certainly doesn’t exist; this is therefore an illusion, perhaps a result of indigestion. But the Devil is sure that he exists, and believes in his upside-down theology. What, then, will frighten him? You make the sign of the cross, and he vanishes in a puff of brimstone.

Umberto Eco Quotes Social Media

Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.

Umberto Eco Quotes about Heart

The light in her eyes was beyond description, yet it did not instil improper thoughts: it inspired a love tempered by awe, purifying the hearts it inflamed.

What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.

Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart.

You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the true primordial passion. It is love that’s abnormal. That is why Christ was killed: he spoke against nature. You don’t love someone for your whole life – that impossible hope is the source of adultery, matricide, betrayal of friends … But you can hate someone for your whole life – provided he’s always there to keep your hatred alive. Hatred warms the heart.

Umberto Eco Quotes Baudouin

Yes, I know, it’s not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.

and I said to him when you learn to read then you learn everything you didn’t know before. But when you write you write only what you know already so patient I’m better off not knowing how to write because the ass is the ass

What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?

And so it was that the Poet, through an excess of theological refinement, was unable to satisfy his coarse carnal passion.

Umberto Eco Quotes Father

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Umberto Eco Quotes on Death

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.

Umberto Eco Quotes on Art

The Art of the Romance, though warning us that it is providing fictions, opens a door into the Palace of Absurdity, and when we have lightly stepped inside, slams it shut behind us.

Translation is the art of failure.

It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.

Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.

Umberto Eco Quotes on Beauty

Beauty is, in some way, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages… a beautiful object must always follow certain rules. A beautiful nose shouldn’t be longer than that or shorter than that, on the contrary, an ugly nose can be as long as the one of Pinocchio, or as big as the trunk of an elephant, or like the beak of an eagle, and so ugliness is unpredictable, and offers an infinite range of possibility. Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God.

Umberto Eco Quotes about Home

For such is the fate of parody: it must never fear exaggerating. If it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile–and without a blush–in steadfast virile seriousness.

For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.

My maternal grandmother – she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.

It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.

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